In spite of the discourse on which rural tourism is built, tourism entrepreneurs have done little to integrate elements of local material culture in the architecture of their pensiuni or in their interior decorations. As I have already shown, in Bran and Moieciu most guesthouses make a radical break with older building styles. There are, however, a few cases when people tried to preserve old houses or to build new ones in the vernacular style of the past. Quite tellingly, all of them are outsiders, either foreigners, or Romanians with a long experience of living abroad. Such characters include an actress who is married to a German and has lived for over two decades in Germany, a Frenchman who moved to the village a few years ago after marrying a local, a famous Romanian actor, a former ex-pat with a doctorate in Geophysics, or the honorary Romanian consul in Boston.
Figure 13 - Pensiune built in the vernacular architecture of the region typical for the 19th century.
The guesthouse pictured above is the most faithful reproduction of a casa cu curte Ð the U-shaped house with a courtyard that was the most popular form of vernacular architecture until the beginning of the 20th century. It belongs to a Romanian born and raised abroad who currently resides in Boston. He descends from one of the elite families of Rucăr region32, with generations traced back 450 years ago. His parents had
been exiled during the communist regime and his first visit to Romania was in 1968, when he took part in a National Geographic expedition. Liking one of the old houses in Moieciu, he sketched it in his notebook, and after 1989, he returned with the hope of purchasing it. When he found that the building had been relocated to an Ethnographic museum he took, instead, the plans, and built a new house, reproducing the original. The construction was faithful to the vernacular building methods: wooden pegs were used instead of iron ones and the logs were cut by axe instead of mechanic saws. The guesthouse is furnished with restored antique furniture and decorated with old peasant rugs, pots and tools. The accommodation complex also features a century old house from Moieciu, which was moved from another part of the village and is now available to rent as ÔThe Peasant HouseÕ. Room prices Ð including breakfast, start from 150 euro, which is eight time more than the average accommodation rates in Bran and Moieciu. Ironically, the most ÔpeasantÕ guesthouse is only accessible to a luxury clientele.
A more affordable experience of staying in a casa cu curte is offered by a guesthouse that belongs to a large and well-known Romanian touring agency. The building is also a reproduction, but its design is only inspired from the peasantsÕ life, being described by the online adverts as having a ÔrusticÕ style. Interior and exterior walls feature colourful paintings in a modern reinterpretation of pastoral symbols and the room furnishings are new.
Figure 14 - Reinterpretation of pastoral material culture.
The only example of an original old casa cu curte being used as a guesthouse is a small house belonging to a Frenchman who settled in Moieciu after marrying a local woman. A photography enthusiast, he transformed an old shed into a small exhibition room and he refurbished the old house in the vicinity, renting it out to foreign visitors.
Figure 15 – Casa cu curte – possibly the oldest building in Moieciu to serve as a guesthouse.
Similar cases to those presented here are found in other destinations across Romania. Whenever there is a strong interest for preserving and restoring traditional architecture and for creating touristic products that are intended to be coherent, faithful reproductions of past material and immaterial culture, the actors involved belong to an educated elite, often foreign or with experience of living abroad. Perhaps the best- known example in the British world is the Prince of Wales, who owns two guesthouses in Romania and has given constant support to a Romanian charity working towards the preservation of the countryÕs rural heritage.
The only local initiative that I can include in this category comes from a couple in Albac, a teacher married to a former mayor, who collaborated with OVR in the early 90s and went to Belgium for a training. The family was among the first to receive tourists in Albac in their home, located near the centre of the village. Later, at the request of tourists in search for a more isolated location, they decided to rent out the wifeÕs parentsÕ home, located in one of AlbacÕs remote villages, high on the mountain slopes. They kept the original architecture33, furniture, and even made mattresses filled
with leafs, as their parents used to have.
33
Figure 16 – Old house in the remote village of Costeşti (1100m), transformed into a pensiune.
With the exception of this last case, it seems that the more people are removed from the rural past, the stronger their concern with an accurate reproduction of it and with the authenticity of the elements they use. Most of the guesthouse owners who show attachment to symbols and material elements of the past, have, in fact, never experienced that version of the past. They are driven by what Appadurai has described as Ônostalgia without memoryÕ (Appadurai 1996:30), by displaying and consuming symbols of a past that is not theirs. The more faithful their representation of this past, the more distant their actual lifestyle has been to a similar lived experience.
Moving away from architecture and turning to smaller elements of the material universe of pensiuni, the traces of the past are once again not very noticeable. Along with hand-made clothes, many tools and other hand-crafted objects became obsolete even before the onset of tourism. Flooded with a growing variety of affordable consumer items, villagers all over Romania lost interest in their old household and clothing items. Wooden tools, embroidered clothing and hand-woven carpets were easily discarded34 or sold to antique dealers and foreign tourists, for small amounts of
money35. Guesthouses where such objects are displayed are rare, and they usually have
an eclectic style, with interiors mixing modern industrial elements with local hand-made items.
34 Back in 2004 when I was an undergraduate, I returned home from fieldwork in a Romanian village
with two blouses and a skirt, all hand-made and with intricate embroidery that had required weeks of work. Some of my colleagues had visited a household where they found such old clothing items used as cleaning cloths. When they showed interest for these outfits, the owner was happy to give them whatever blouses and skirts she still had, so they came back with a big pile and divided it among all of the girls in our team.
35 In Albac someone told me how her grandmother had given away her sculpted spindle, a very old tool
In Bran and Moieciu I found just one pensiune where the host had set up an entire room as a small museum, showing weaving machines, carpets and clothes. Most of the objects were inherited from her parents, who used to be well-known weavers in the region. Even if wood and wool are still available resources in the area, there was no interest in reviving old crafts and producing more hand-made objects. There is a thriving souvenir market in the vicinity of the Castle, where one can easily find fridge magnets, colourful party wigs, and a large variety of plastic toys. Dairy, meat and sheepskins are the only locally produced goods that can be purchased in this bazaar. Most other objects available are industrial items, usually made in China, even if some of them are wooden objects, or embroided shirts, or tablecloths reminding of the local production. One of the sellers from the fair explained that some time ago people came from China, took samples of the artisan products that they were selling, and then they started mass-producing them. The few cases of artisans who actually produce the merchandise themselves are not making any area-specific objects and they are non- locals. The embroidery they use for tablecloths or clothing is described as ÔnationalÕ, and is inspired by a delocalised pool of symbols.
Turning now to the more fluid elements of culture that have been integrated in the tourist offer, ÔtraditionÕ often refers to practices and objects that were linked to local ways of securing a livelihood. Since people no longer needed to make their own clothing or tools, practices that were connected to this domestic production have disappeared. A good example is the ÔsittingÕ or șezătoare, a gathering of women who were knitting, sawing clothes and weaving carpets. One of the largest businesses in Moieciu has recreated this practice as part of an entertainment program for organised
Figure 19- Bedroom with old carpets on the wall and on the armchair, a sheep’s skin on the floor, laminated parquet and furniture, and contemporary bedding with a red hearts print. Figure 20 - Exhibition room in a pensiune owned by a local family in Moieciu displaying weaving tools and hand-made clothing and carpets.
groups of foreigners. The tourists come by bus but they are dropped a few kilometers away from the guesthouse, where they are picked up in horse-drawn carts. The ride finishes with their arrival at the pensiune. Next, they are invited to the restaurant, where a couple of girls dressed in folk-inspired outfits await by the door with small cups of plum brandy (ţuica) and little pieces of smoked pork fat (slănină). At the end of their meal in the restaurant, they find themselves surrounded by women who spin wool or embroider shirts, in an attempt to recreate the now abandoned custom of şezătoare. In this way, tourists experiment fragments of village life: a cart ride, a shot of ţuica, a glimpse of a şezătoare. However, all these things are taken out of context: the carts are customised for group sitting, they are decorated with colourful rugs, which is not typical, the ţuica, normally part of a meal, is served when entering the building and the women only re-enact the sitting in an unusual context. Villagers themselves may be included in displays of tradition and authenticity, when they dress up in their folk garbs and entertain their guests. On a different occasion I could observe a host who one minute was sitting behind a desk, answering one of his two mobile phones, surrounded by computers, printers, faxes and other gadgets, while the next minute he would jump into a century old embroided shirt to serve plum brandy to his guests and spin in front of them a sheep on a spit - which, for that matter, had been already cooked in a very large professional oven in the kitchen. The main stake of those who adopt this style is to attract tourists and to provide entertainment, not to preserve local heritage and display a faithful image of the different elements of culture.
Figure 17 – Foreign tourists arriving in a horse-drawn cart and lining up to enter the restaurant where they receive a shot of plum brandy (țuică).
Religious and pastoral celebrations offer some of the best opportunities for inviting tourists to experience ÔauthenticÕ local practices. Even the local authorities in collaboration with ANTREC became involved in organising one such event called răvăşitul oilor Ð translated as Ôscattering the sheepÕ. According to the locals, răvăşitul
oilor used to be a period during the autumn months when flocks of sheep would be brought back from the mountains and ÔscatteredÕ through the village as they went back to their different owners. Today the event features a big fair where various food products are sold and folkloric bands come to perform. This custom never involved the kind of ÔcarnivalÕ or b‰lci, as people call it, that one sees today. Nowadays it is tourists, rather than sheep, that come flocking.
Sheep donÕt come all of them at the same time [É] this is something like the Dracula myth. The same goes with răvășitul oilor. Everything is commercial, everything is a fa•ade, everything is for the money (Alina Faur, pensiune owner, Bran).
Christmas and Easter are the best times for invoking tradition when advertising holiday packages. Most of the offers revolve around gastronomy and the rich variety of dishes specific for these celebrations. At Christmas, when pork is the staple dish, some pensiuni take the opportunity to show tourists the very first stages of food preparation, setting up pig-slaughtering demonstrations. These are enacting the pre-Christian pig- sacrificing custom called Ignat, which is still widespread in rural Romania. The pig killing is an event that gathers the entire household as well as the neighbours. The killing is followed by portioning and processing parts of the animal while the participants have occasional shots of hot plum brandy for warming up. In larger establishments that cater for big groups of tourists this event has become more ÔsanitiesedÕ and staged. However, for the average guesthouses, this is still a family event that is not openly advertised to tourists and where only regular guests who specifically ask to take part are invited.
Figure 18 – Pig slaughtering demonstration, organised by one of the largest hotels in Moieciu, owned by an urbanite (left) and Cheese making demonstration, organised by the guesthouse presented in Figure 33 that belongs to a big touring agency from Bucharest (right).
Linking the episodes discussed above with MacCannellÕs (1973) approach to authenticity, it seems that we are witnessing a classic case of Ôstaged authentictyÕ. As he argued, touristsÕ belief that ÔauthenticÕ culture can be found ÔbackstageÕ prompts the tourism industry to create displays that resemble a ÔbackstageÕ. The intention is usually to have visitors believe that they are witnessing aspects of Ôreal lifeÕ that have not been packaged for tourists. Such efforts are however largely missing in Bran or Moieciu, where the staged nature of activities becomes immediately apparent. Guests are not really taken ÔbackstageÕ to the quarters where locals live and carry out their farm-related work. Instead, activites are selected, extracted from their regular flow and brought in front of large groups of tourists standing Ð as images above illustrate Ð outside in the garden, or in a restaurant. The result is a pseudo-Ôstaged-authenticityÕ, where tourists are happy to have glimpses of Ôtraditional lifeÕ brought in front of them and they almost never venture in an active pursuit of ÔbackstagesÕ.